Anthony Minghella's visually-arresting staging, a co-production with New York's Metropolitan Opera and the Lithuanian National Opera, returned this month to its original home at the London Coliseum after a gap of two years.
The Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, after suffering a calamitous fire in the early 1990s, reopened in 1999, lovingly restored. TDK has released a series of DVDs from the Liceu since that date, providing ample evidence of the world...
Premiered posthumously, the symphonic song-cycle Das Lied von der Erde by Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) remains one of his defining works because of its synthesis of song and symphony, two genres he pursued throughout his career.
While I eagerly seized upon an opportunity to hear Angelika Kirschlager live for the first time, having written in very recent weeks about not one but two of the star mezzo’s current CD releases, I ventured to Frankfurt’s Alte Oper feeling a little bit like her stalker.
When I worked in the Archives of the Met, I was custodian of several hundred costumes, many from the days when divas traveled with steamer trunks full of things run up just for them, by the finest designers, with the most glamorous materials, in the colors and styles that suited the ladies themselves.
In 1851 during his first season as music director in Düsseldorf, Robert Schumann presented a performance of Bach’s St. John Passion, and unsurprisingly adapted the score both to nineteenth-century taste and nineteenth-century practicalities.
The centrality of dance at the French court helped bring grace, order, and political allegory into the characteristic prominence they enjoyed during the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV; theatre presentations of all stripes were infused with choreographic diversions.
In tandem with the recently released set of Sir Simon Rattle’s recordings of Mahler’s symphonies on EMI Classics, the set of the complete symphonies by Jean Sibelius merits attention.
There is nothing redeeming about Sir John Falstaff, one of Shakespeare’s most lively comic characters and the subject of Verdi’s final opera, and yet, inexplicably, we love him.
What constitutes an “international opera star” these days, anyway?
As much as Richard Wagner espoused opera reform in his theoretical writings by bringing to his works for the stage a closer unity between music and text, his actual means of doing so at times involved the use of orchestral forces that sometimes overwhelmed the sung word.
The budget label Gala purveys live performances both historic and relatively recent; of the three discussed here, the La Scala Fedora dates back to 1931, while the Attila comes from a 1987 La Fenice performance.
National styles of music in the seventeenth century were often distinctive, and in the case of French and Italian music, famously so.
With its recent release of Mahler’s symphonies conducted by Sir Simon Rattle, EMI Classics makes available in a single place an outstanding contribution to the composer’s discography.
This DVD records and commemorates a 1981 production of Parsifal in its Bayreuth lair, and the singers of 1981 are as fine as recollection might paint them.
Once the custom of the world's opera houses was to translate great operas into the language of each respective country.
Repackaging older recordings having become the primary focus of a classical recording company's business, Deutsche Grammophon budgeted some funds for art direction for its budget series called "Opera House" (although that appellation only appears in a link found on the back inside cover of the sets' booklets).
Of Rosenkavaliers on DVD, the classics tend to be lovingly detailed productions, going back to the film of Herbert von Karajan leading an exemplary cast, with Elizabeth Schwarzkopf's iconic Marschallin.
The Metropolitan Opera audience loves its Wagner, and the management for the last several decades has, alas, made sure we aren’t spoiled: it’s a rare season that gets more than two production revivals of Wagner, and some years there have been none.
Despite an unsurprising degree of conservatism in liturgical music, devotional life in Rome often found ways of taking advantage of modern musical style.
The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky joins more than a dozen similar volumes published by the Cambridge University Press over the years and devoted to the life and works of a single composer. Each one traditionally is a collection of essays by leading scholars in the field, organized into three main sections — biography; works (mostly by genre); reception and posthumous legacy.
Predictably, however, just like the composer in question, this Companion is much too complex to fit comfortably into the mold. The reader will immediately note the seemingly disproportionate amount of space dedicated to the issue of reception: six of fourteen articles are placed in that section of the volume, with many essays from the other two sections veering frequently in the same direction. Indeed, as Christopher Butler’s and Arnold Whittall’s essays in the opening section illustrate, contributions to this collection inevitably represent conflicting trends in Stravinsky criticism. In “Stravinsky as Modernist,” Butler casts the composer in his traditional role as a “conservative modernist” as opposed to Arnold Schoenberg’s “progressive avant-garde.” Meanwhile, Whittall, in a rather unfortunately titled “Stravinsky in Context” (now there’s a title that means everything and nothing!), often contradicts his colleague while discussing many stylistic and compositional parallels between Stravinsky and Schoenberg. Commissioned separately, the essays do not engage each other’s arguments. Instead, the authors polemicize — vehemently at times — with Richard Taruskin, whose distinct, distinguished shadow has loomed large over the Stravinsky discourse ever since the 1996 publication of his comprehensive two-volume Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions. Indeed, several essays in this Companion are heavily indebted to Taruskin’s work. This includes Rosamund Bartlett’s opening article “Stravinsky’s Russian Origins,” the only truly biographical essay in the volume. But while Bartlett’s fascinating account of the artistic life in early 20th-century Russia is well worth the reader’s attention, I hesitate to make the same claim for the two “Russian” essays in Part 2 of the collection, Anthony Pople’s “Early Stravinsky” and Kenneth Gloag’s “Russian Rites: Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, Les Noces.” While both authors make a point of summarizing the views of other scholars, such as Pieter van den Toorn and Stephen Walsh, as well as bringing their own perspectives to the table, the number of Taruskin references in Pople’s account in particular is at times so overwhelming that one feels a strong desire to abandon the Companion altogether and run back to the original.
Thankfully, that feeling disappears as the reader progresses through the volume and away from the “origins.” Martha M. Hyde’s insightful essay “Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism” explores the complex notions of engagement with time, past and present, imitation, anachronism, and the relationship between neoclassicism and post-modern pastiche. Opera lovers will be delighted to see a significant portion of the article devoted to the analysis of The Rake’s Progress, in its textual and musical dialogue with Goethe’s Faust. Music for — broadly defined — theater is also the subject of the editor, Jonathan Cross’s contribution to the volume, “Stravinsky’s Theaters,” in which he discusses the aspects of “high” and “low” in the composer’s various staged projects. One of the most valuable contributions to the volume, in my opinion, is Joseph Straus’s wonderful overview “Stravinsky the Serialist”; but a word of caution — the author’s detailed analysis of specific passages may prove prohibitive for the uninitiated.
Two of six “reception” essays in the Companion also include analysis of excerpts from Stravinsky’s serial compositions. In a part of his “Stravinsky and Us” (to be discussed below), Richard Taruskin offers an alternative (or perhaps a complementary) view of Stravinsky’s journey into serialism to the one outlined in Straus’s article through the textual analysis of the Cantata. Meanwhile, Craig Ayrey, in “Stravinsky in Analysis: The Anglophone Traditions,” traces and critiques the analytical approaches to Stravinsky’s music used in the English-speaking world by applying them to the Lacrimosa section of the Requiem Canticles. Unlike Taruskin’s, and even more so than Straus’s essay, Ayrey’s contribution is dense with formulas, and thus not recommended for amateurs or the faint of heart.
To the contrary, Nicholas Cook’s delightful essay titled “Stravinsky conducts Stravinsky” is a must equally for a scholar, performer, and intelligent listener. Cook examines the composer’s attitude toward the value of interpretation in performance, and poses questions on the relative significance of the composer’s own conducting for discerning his intentions by pointing out important interpretive deviations in his successive recordings of the Rite of Spring. The essay also includes astute observations about the connections between Stravinsky’s “new objectivity” and the issues of “authenticity” in contemporary performance practice. For a different kind of contemporary practice, Jonathan Cross’s interview with Louis Andriessen titled “Composing with Stravinsky” addresses Stravinsky’s influence on this Dutch composer, as well as on other composers today, an influence — it is asserted — that is still in its early stages. The interview is a worthy read; the only drawback perhaps is that the discourse all too frequently abandons its supposed subject matter and focuses on Adriessen’s career instead.
Two articles in the Companion address the most classic issue in Stravinsky reception — criticism. Stuart Campbell’s essay “Stravinsky and the Critics” provides an overview of the composer’s relationship with his critics throughout his long career, and elucidates the role played by these critics (including the fellow expatriates and composer colleagues) in disseminating his works and ideas. Max Paddison’s “Stravinsky as Devil: Adorno’s Three Critiques” discusses the complexities, contradictions, internal motivations, and a gradual evolution of Theodore Adorno’s Stravinsky critiques, from the late 1920s through the early 1960s.
Overall, The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky should wear the label “use with caution.” While a specialist student of Stravinsky would find in it much fascinating and useful material, the collection would not serve as a good general introduction to the composer’s life and works. The reason for this, primarily, is the absence of a continuous narrative or even a coherent argument — in a word, a single point of view. It is a pity that the format of a Cambridge Companion does not provide for an in-depth editorial introduction — beyond, that is, the four sentences available on the opening page. Without it, the diversity of angles and the sharpness of arguments may distract and confuse a reader not easily familiar with the daily fads of Stravinskian discourse. In a stroke of editorial ingenuity, Taruskin’s “Stravinsky and Us” serves as a conclusion to the volume. This essay’s main focus is unraveling a variety of self-constructed and posthumously imposed “Stravinsky” mythologies that engender our daily engagement with the phenomenon of this composer and his music. To an extent, the controversies and contradictions that fill the current Companion themselves provide a telling illustration of the enduring power of the myths, and the eternal pleasure we musicologists derive from endlessly perpetuating them.
Olga Haldey
University of Missouri-Columbia
Olga Hadley is plain silly for suggesting that a sholarly 'companion' has to have a 'single point of view'. She perpetuates a myth that complex subjects have to be clad in some petrified Aristotelian narrative. Her reception of the book is often biased toward what requires less effort to absorb (hence-- for Opera Today readers?). Perhaps these have the requisite single points of view.
I myself find similar weaknesses as she does in some of the essays, but mostly from J. Cross' theatre theories which are not conversant enough with Peter Brook's 'Empty Space' to negotiate these compellingly as musical analogues.
seb lecoq